“The capability to listen”: Keeley Brooks ’25 tells the story of legendary teacher through oral histories

Keeley Brooks ’25 is the first Yale College student to enter a senior thesis in the Oral History of American Music collection. “54 Years in the Studio: An Oral History on Dorothy DeLay”—audio recordings and transcripts—will be available this summer worldwide for free via Archives at Yale.

Brooks’s subject is the music educator and violinist Dorothy DeLay (1917–2002). Brooks first discovered her when applying to conservatories as a violinist. “I couldn’t find a music faculty that didn’t have a DeLay student teaching for them,” Brooks said. “And yet I also hadn’t heard of DeLay before I noticed this. This disconnect drew me in from the beginning, encouraging me to try and understand what she was doing and how I could learn more about her.”

DeLay’s name is not well known beyond the musical community, but in her decades-long career at the Juilliard School and other institutions, DeLay mentored generations of international professional musicians and music educators. For her thesis, Brooks wanted to study what made DeLay such a prolific and esteemed violin teacher. To find out, she decided to interview DeLay’s former students.

“I wanted to understand what realizations people were having about DeLay’s teaching now, years later, that they didn’t recognize while they were studying with her—in order to help my reader understand not only her legacy but what her teaching shows us about what to value in mentorship and education.” What Brooks eventually discovered, she said, is that “DeLay shows us that the root of education is the capability to listen.”

The beginnings

Karin Roffman—senior lecturer in Humanities, English, and American Studies and associate director of Public Humanities—was the first person to suggest that Brooks tell DeLay’s story through oral histories. In spring 2023, Brooks was a student in Roffman’s “Writing the Biography” course, enthusiastically sharing what she was learning in the DeLay archives at the Juilliard School and in her conversations with DeLay’s former students, now teachers themselves.

Roffman introduced Brooks to Libby Van Cleve, director of the Oral History of American Music, who became Brooks’s mentor and collaborator. Throughout the project, Brooks also worked closely with her thesis advisor, Lindsay Wright, assistant professor of Music and a music historian and ethnographer. Wright’s class “Music as Education” provided Brooks with a framework for the project, raising questions about how to think about teaching, how to listen and collaborate, and how to engage students in a dialogue.

Brooks officially began her research in summer 2023. With funding from the Morse College Richter Fellowship and the Dockterman Family Humanities Fellowship, she was able to attend the Starling-DeLay Violin Symposium at the Juilliard School. “This five-day symposium was an incredible opportunity to meet other educators,” Brooks said, “and see DeLay’s teaching philosophy and legacy in action.”

In spring 2024, at Van Cleve’s suggestion, Brooks attended the “Getting Started with Oral History Workshop” at Baylor University. The purpose was to acquire some formal training in the discipline of oral history interviewing. Interviewing, Brooks said, much like education, is a “discipline that values listening.”

The project

“54 Years in the Studio” was a two-year-long project. Brooks conducted 29 in-person and Zoom interviews and had many casual conversations with DeLay’s students and colleagues. She traveled virtually to recital halls, to DeLay’s Studio 530 at the Juilliard School, and to the studios of DeLay’s former students. She attended music performances and met a wide network of musicians, colleagues, and friends eager to talk to her about DeLay’s influence on them.

The process of gathering oral histories spanned from May 2024 through April 2025. “In capturing the memories of DeLay’s students,” Brooks wrote, “the oral history collection remains a living archive of her legacy, introducing listeners to insights about her teaching, shared by students decades after they worked with her.”

On April 28, Brooks presented her senior thesis to fellow music students and the general public in the seminar room of Gilmore Music Library. She played excerpts of audio recordings of professional violinists and music educators she had interviewed, including Priscilla Hallberg, Cornelia Heard, Paul Kantor, and Livia Sohn. Also among the interviewees were international violinists Ayako Yonetani—one of DeLay’s teaching assistants at Julliard—and American violinist and musicologist Ray Iwazumi, a faculty member at the school. Several interviewees, including Heard and Yonetani, attended Brooks’s thesis presentation via Zoom.

The legacy

“Keeley has made a significant contribution with this series of interviews and her excellent transcripts,” said Van Cleve. “Her work will surely benefit future musicians, pedagogues, and scholars.” 

Brooks has also developed her thesis into a book proposal. She is planning to submit the proposal to Oxford University Press, which has an Oxford Oral History series of books in its program.

 “What does it mean to leave a legacy that isn’t simply a statistic of professional soloists, but the emotional development of hundreds of students?” Brooks asks in the introduction to the proposal.

“We can’t quantify the ripple effect of DeLay’s philosophy on my generation of students, as the young individuals she taught carry her ethos with them to their own studios. We can’t put a number to these facets of her legacy, but we can remember the stories of the language she used and the feelings and choices that her words and actions inspired,” she wrote. “That has been the driving force behind the creation of this oral history archive and book proposal.”

—Deborah Cannarella

Photos: Keeley Brooks and Libby Van Cleve, Dorothy DeLay by Arthur Montzka (originally published in “Strings” magazine), Ayako Yonetani and Dorothy DeLay